Eddie Stubbs

Eddie Stubbs (born November 25, 1961) is a radio disc jockey broadcasting old-style country music on WSM, Nashville, Tennessee. He is also one of three regular announcers for the long-running Grand Ole Opry carried on WSM on Friday and Saturday nights.

A fifth-generation resident of Montgomery County, Maryland, he graduated from Gaithersburg (Maryland) High School and became a fiddle player with traditional bluegrass band The Johnson Mountain Boys. After a decade, the band split up and Stubbs only played sporadically after that. Stubbs' first radio job was a weekly bluegrass show for WYII-FM in Williamsport, Maryland in 1983 where he earned $20 per program. In 1984 he was hired by WAMU-FM in Washington, D.C. and worked alongside veteran country deejay Gary Henderson. He received his own show in 1990 but continued to do odd-jobs such as house-painting to supplement his income. "No one gets rich in radio," he observed. The Eddie Stubbs Show on WAMU was discontinued in April 2007.

He developed a friendship with country singer Kitty Wells and her husband, fiddle-player Johnnie Wright, and played with them during D.C.-area appearances. They eventually convinced Stubbs to move to Nashville in 1995 and join them full-time. But within seventeen days of arriving in the country music capital, he was hired by The Grand Ole Opry as a regular announcer. "Five people up for the job, and the new kid in town gets the gig? If that's not God, I don't know what is," said Stubbs.

A self-taught music scholar, he brings an exhaustive knowledge to his radio shows, working without notes during his aircast which regularly beats FM country stations in Nashville in the Arbitron ratings. In 2002, Stubbs was named the Country Music Association's Large Market Air Personality of the Year. The alternative weekly Nashville Scene named him Best Country Deejay, and he has also been listed in Nashville Life magazine's 100 Coolest People.

References

*Heim, Joe, Washington Post article, "The Old Country - DJ Eddie Stubbs Won't Let Nashville Forget Its Roots", Sunday, 27 July 2003, pages N-1 and 7.